Chapter 1
NATALIE
The rain starts the second the car stops moving.
Five years. Five years since I last stood on this ground, and Ashford still smells like rain on stone, like money, like the inside of a house I was never allowed to run in.
My fingers find the scar at my wrist without meaning to.
The city’s grown taller since I left. More glass, more gold light spilling out of windows that don’t want you looking in. Still the same gray underneath it, though. Still pressing down on my chest, the second I step out from under the umbrella.
You have to face what you’re most afraid of, or the sickness doesn’t let go of you. That’s what Hazel, my healer, told me, the last session before I flew back. She’s the only person in three continents who’s heard the whole shape of what happened to me here.
So I’m facing it. That’s all tonight is. A reunion, a room full of people who used to hold me down, and I’m going to walk in anyway.
“Natalie?”
Someone’s running up behind me, quick, half-slipping on the wet stone. I know the voice before I turn around — it takes me three full seconds to put a name to it anyway.
“It’s really you! I looked at you for, like, a full minute before I believed it.” Sonya Bennett, in a maroon sweater, the same wide grin she had at seventeen. She was one of maybe two people in that entire building who never once looked at me like I was something to step over.
“Sonya.” I let myself smile. It’s not hard with her.
She loops her arm through mine like no time has passed at all, already steering us toward the doors. “You’re a designer now? Ceremonial spaces, claiming grounds, all that? I remember you could build anything out of nothing.”
“Something like that.” I nod.
“Perfect timing, we’ve got a birthday gala for one of the ranked families next month, I’ll need someone exactly like you—”
“Call me.” I hold a card out to her, quick, before a gust can take it.
She takes it, slips it into her coat pocket, and pulls the revolving door open. “God, it’s freezing. Come on, before we turn into icicles. We’re already the last ones in.”
Ashford autumn. Colder than I remember, or maybe I just forgot what my own body feels like when it isn’t somewhere warm and far away.
The door spins us into heat, light, noise—something in me goes still and cold at the same time.
FIFTH REUNION, the banner says, gold letters over a group photo the size of a wall. I find myself in it without wanting to — bangs in my eyes, shoulders folded in, a smudge of a girl standing at the very edge of the frame while everyone else leans into the camera like the light belongs to them.
Kendall Carter is dead center of that photo. Holding Vance’s arm like she was born knowing how.
Vance. Golden boy of every pack that matters in this city, and I called him brother for eight years.
I almost cost him his name. So I understand, now, why he stopped looking at me the way he used to.
“Natalie?”
The voice slides down my spine like a blade drawn slowly. I turn, and there she is — red dress, that same face, five years having done nothing but sharpen her.
The old burns on my back wake up before I do. My body remembers what happened in the locked equipment room, where I was used as an ashtray by someone who was supposed to be my equal.
“Kendall.” My voice comes out steadier than I expect.
“Look at you.” She tips her head, smiling like we’re old friends. “I almost didn’t recognize you. So much prettier now.”
I press my thumbnail hard into my palm. The pain pulls me back into my own body.
One. Two. Three. Hazel’s counting, worn smooth from repetition.
“Thank you,” I say. I don’t look away, and I don’t shrink.
That’s new. She notices it too — I watch something flicker behind her eyes, some recalibration she wasn’t expecting to have to make.
“I heard you went abroad.” Her mouth curves. “Didn’t think you’d actually show your face tonight.”
“Long time no see,” is all I give her.
The air goes tight for a second before she sighs, theatrical, and rests a hand on my shoulder like we’re sharing a joke between us. “We had some misunderstandings, back then. I was young. Don’t hold it against me.”
I look at that hand. I remember exactly what it’s done—cold water down my collar in the middle of winter, my face shoved into cement, the particular way she used to make sure no one else was looking before she started.
“It’s fine,” I say, pleasant as anything. “You’re not young anymore, though.”
Her face colors. Three years older than me, and right now it might as well be thirty.
Something colder moves behind her eyes, and she opens her mouth to answer it —
“Nattie.”
The whole room seems to drop ten degrees of noise at once.
I don’t need to turn around to know. My whole chest already knows, has known since I was ten years old, and someone told me this boy was my brother now.
Vance. The person I spent my entire youth in love with, quietly and uselessly.
If it weren’t for that, Kendall would never have had a reason to touch me at all. I let her keep hurting me because I was terrified she’d tell him.
I turn. He’s standing under the light like it was made for him, gold catching along every clean line of his face, those slow, heavy-lidded eyes that always looked at people like he had all the time in the world for them.
When I was young, I thought that softness was just for me. Then I stood in front of him once, soaked through, shaking, and he looked at me with that exact same gentleness before he turned and walked away.
That was the day I understood. It was never softness. It was just good breeding. He kept that particular distance for everyone, and an even more careful one for me.
“Brother.” My throat is tight around the word.
For one long second, there’s no one else in the room. Just his eyes on my face, surprised — more surprised than Kendall was, even.
He almost says something. Kendall doesn’t let him.
“Vance, your sister’s changed so much, I barely recognized her.” Her hand tightens on his arm.
Vance looks down at that hand like it’s something he’s only just noticing is there. His jaw tenses, just slightly.
“Nattie.” He turns back to me first, before her. “You’re back. Why didn’t you tell your brother you were coming?”
“I wanted to surprise you and your parents.” I smile like there’s nothing underneath it.
Something in his shoulders eases. He believes it—believes I’ve let go of whatever I might have held against him for shipping me across an ocean five years ago.
“You remember Kendall, right?” A small pause, careful, like he’s choosing each word for its own weight. “She’s my luna to be.”
I go very still. Of course, he’d choose her.
That explains every vague, careful non-answer in every email he sent me while I was gone. He always knew exactly what Kendall did to me all those years.
He knew, and he’s mating her anyway.
